Noise is an unnoticed health hazard that has been overlooked for many years. It is the fastest growing pollutant in the urban environment and causes annoyance, illness, loss of quality of life, and reduces life expectancy. Medical studies show that noise affects the nervous and hormonal systems and consequently disrupts the stability of human biological system. The alarming report by the World Health Organization estimated that the health impact of environmental noise in Western Europe could be up to 1.6 million healthy life years lost annually through ill health, disability or early death.
There are several sources for environmental noises that may include aircrafts, road traffic, railways, industries, and construction. However, vehicle traffic is the major source of noise in urban environments. One way to reduce the impact of environmental noise is to have a better planning of traffic flow and may initially predict that for better city planning. The first step is to know the spatial distribution of noise and possibly the types of noises. These are essential information to provide to ameliorate the noise pollution. In this proposal we try to develop wireless nodes equipped with microphones to sense the noises at different locations. Then transmit this information to a central processor to analyse the noise strength and type. This would help plotting what we can call noise topographical map. There are several challenges in this project such as the nodes power consumption and networking of those nodes as well as the algorithms to analyse the noises. We are not expecting to solve all these challenges but to put a viable scenario to design such system which will be part of long term project.
Undergraduate
A setup for a distributed system that can sense noises from different locations and transmit to a main processor for information analysis
The research components are to understand the IoT system structure; Ubiquitous sensing; and develop algorithms to run the system.
Skills in embedded systems
Advantageous skill in signal processing
Lab allocations have not been finalised